Blog Archive

Wednesday, January 31, 2018

Gloria Grahame - 4 Films: Crossfire (1947), In a Lonely Place (1950), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), The Big Heat (1953)

My last review was of the new picture, Film Stars Don’t Die In Liverpool, which stars Annette Bening as Gloria Grahame, the sultry, Academy Award-winning screen star of the late 1940s and 1950s. [Here’s a link to that review]  I suspect that many of you who have seen that film, and in fact anyone who enjoys older movies and/or great acting, might be interested in exploring some of Grahame’s cinema work, so what follows are brief reviews of four of her best.

Before getting started, however, for those who haven’t read my previous post, I’ll reiterate my brief bio of Gloria Grahame:

As a character in Film Stars put it, Grahame was “a big name in black and white films” but didn’t do so well in color. During her best years, which stretched from the late 1940s well into the 1950s, she was a household name – nominated for an Oscar for her supporting role in Crossfire, as a bargirl peripherally caught up in a murder investigation; then winning the award for playing Dick Powell’s vivacious Southern belle wife in The Bad and the Beautiful. She held her own opposite Humphrey Bogart in the great noir classic In a Lonely Place and was the tough moll to Richard Widmark’s psychopathic hood in The Big Heat (1953). Others may remember her as Ado Annie Carnes, the girl who “caint say no” in the film adaptation of Oklahoma (1955), although that was far from the typical Grahame movie.

By the late 1950s, however, her star began to dim. Her maverick reputation; some scandals fueled by her libidinous spirit; and age (she turned 37 in 1960, ancient by Hollywood’s standards – still a big problem for actresses today, but even more so back then) all contributed. But she kept on acting – mostly in live theater and increasingly in less than marquee venues. Sometimes she’d get occasional bit parts in movies or TV, too. Yet, as shown in Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, Grahame’s spirit never waned. She died in 1981 at age 57.
  
In all the pictures in which I’ve seen her, Grahame brings real commitment and an ephemeral star quality to her roles. However small the part – for her Oscar winning role in The Bad and the Beautiful, she was on screen for less than ten minutes, tops – she always seems alive, and her performance is invariably memorable.

Let’s start with In a Lonely Place from 1950, in which Gloria co-stars and goes toe to toe with Humphrey Bogart. This is probably my favorite Gloria Grahame movie, and also happens to be one of my favorite Bogie pictures. It’s considered a film noir classic, and was an A-Lister, not a B-movie like many of that genre. It’s directed by the great Nicolas Ray, who knew something about noir.  

Bogie plays a screenwriter with the cool name of Dixon Steele. Steele was once thought to be     brilliant but is now generally considered washed up, due in part to his reputation as a difficult son-of-a-bitch to work with. Today we’d say he has anger management problems. He also seems to be drinking a lot, but everybody did that back in the day as the movies would have it. [And there’s another character in the film, the aging, downtrodden tragedian Charlie Waterman (charmingly played by Robert Warwick) who is a clearly defined alcoholic, so probably not Dixon Steele.]

Anyway, Steele invites a hat check girl to his apartment one evening to tell him the plot of a trashy best-selling novel that he’s just been asked to turn into a screenplay. He considers it a waste of his precious time to read the book himself. Later, after she leaves, the hatcheck girl turns up dead, and Bogie – the last person to see her alive, is a prime suspect. His tendency to play the wise guy when questioned by the police doesn’t help him much, but his new neighbor, Laurel Gray – played by Grahame – comes forward to corroborate his story. Pretty soon Bogie and the neighbor are falling in love, even as police suspicion of him grows.

It’s pretty neat to see Bogie falling in love. We’ve seen it before, in To Have and Have Not (1944) for example and in brief flashbacks in Casablanca as well, but it is a more domesticated, goofy-grin kind-of swoon that he does here in In a Lonely Place. Given the fresh, forthright, independent spirit of this Miss Gray, not to mention her comeliness, it’s not hard to understand. But there’s also a creepy side to Steele. Before long even we begin to wonder a bit about his story, as does Miss Grey, after she witnesses a couple of his rages.

So we’ve got a sweet, then scary love story plus a murder mystery, and some pretty great performances along the way to thrilling climax! 

This is one of the few A-list movies in which Gloria Grahame plays a leading, rather than a supporting role. Rather than playing a femme fatale or the whore with a heart of gold, she’s more of a hard-luck yet wholesome young woman, almost literally the girl-next-door, and someone we readily can relate to. As I’ve suggested, she is pretty awesome.

As an aside:   Some of those who knew Bogart well, said his character in this picture was probably the closest to the Bogie they knew than any of his other roles. And respecting Gloria, she just happened to be married to the film’s director, Nick Ray, at the time, although the marriage was on the rocks by the time production got underway. The thing with Ray’s son, referenced by Grahame’s sister in Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, undoubtedly played a part. The producers, concerned about marital discord on the set, insisted that her contract contain stipulations saying stuff like "my husband [Ray] shall be entitled to direct, control, advise, instruct and even command my actions during the hours from 9 AM to 6 PM, every day except Sunday.” It also said that she could not “nag, cajole, tease or in any other feminine fashion seek to distract or influence him.” Imagine some lawyer trying to insert such language in an employment contract today!


If you like classic films, In A Lonely Place is a great one.  It’s available for streaming from Amazon, Vudu, iTunes and other streaming services and on DVD from Netflix.

                                        ***
Another terrific movie featuring Gloria Grahame is The Bad and the Beautiful (1952).  This is the picture for which she won the Academy Award for best supporting actress, but it was choc-a-block with better known stars – chief among them being Kirk Douglas and Lana Turner, followed by Dick Powell; as well as a few names some older folks might recall, like Walter Pigeon, as well as Leo G Carroll and Gilbert Roland. Helmed by big-time director Vincent Minelli - remembered for such other classics as  An American In Paris (1951) and Gigi (1958), it was written by Charles Schnee (who also wrote Red River (1948), the great John Wayne - Montgomery Clift vehicle and Butterfield 8 (1960), which won Elizabeth Taylor her first Oscar in 1961). The Bad and the Beautiful itself was nominated for 7 Academy Awards and won 5, including Gloria’s.

The story concerns an ambitious Hollywood movie producer and director named Jonathan Shields, played by Kirk Douglas. Jonathan is talented, charming … and completely ruthless.  Told in flashback form, the film traces this guy’s rise and fall as seen through the eyes of people he has worked with, then stepped on in his climb to the top. The frame of the story is that he is now a Hollywood outcast and is asking each of these folks, all of whom have sworn never to work with him again, to help him make his comeback picture. They include his one-time best friend, a director (played by Barry Sullivan); a screen siren that he discovered and made a star (Lana Turner); and a writer and former academic that he lures to Hollywood (played by Dick Powell). Walter Pigeon as his sort-of consigliere is there at the end to remind each of them why they may, in fact, owe him this favor.

Grahame, as the writer’s wife – a spirited but naive, Southern belle who gets caught up in Kirk Douglas’s schemes – steals (in a good way) every scene she’s in, which is why the gold statuette.  Actually, she can’t steal the scenes she’s in with Kirk Douglas, but she holds her own.  And if you haven’t ever seen Kirk Douglas (father of Michael) in his prime [Ace in The Hole (1951), Spartacus (1960), Lonely Are The Brave (1962)], well – you should. He is a great, great actor. This is a good place to start: he is in full, fabulous flower in The Bad and the Beautiful.  

I myself had never seen this picture until a few weeks ago, after seeing Films Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool.  What a pleasant surprise! A movie that not only holds up well more than sixty-five years after its release, The Bad and the Beautiful has a special resonance in these days of heightened awareness of sexual manipulation and harassment.

The Bad and the Beautiful is available for streaming from Amazon, Vudu, iTunes and other streaming services but, unfortunately not from Netflix.

***

Grahame has yet another great supporting role in the noir classic, The Big Heat (1953). Not to be confused with The Big Sleep (1946), the Howard Hawks movie starring Bogart and Bacall,  The Big Heat is directed by none other than Fritz Lang, master of dark cinema with classics like Metropolis (1927), M (1931), and Scarlet Street (1945). It’s the story of an honest cop in a corrupt city.
Det. Sgt. Dave Bannion is obsessed with bringing down the crime syndicate that runs thingsin his town including, he believes, the mayor and his police chief. Bannion is played by an intense Glenn Ford [Gilda (1946), 3:10 to Yuma (1957)] as a man driven not only for justice but for revenge.  

Bannion is up against some formidable opponents, including the syndicate’s wealthy, suavely amoral boss, Lagana (Alexander Scourby, using his famously sonorous voice to great effect here), but best personified by Lagana’s hot-tempered, vicious lieutenant Vince Stone played by then relatively unknown Lee Marvin [Cat Ballou (1965), The Dirty Dozen (1967)]. Grahame plays Debby Marsh, Stone’s girlfriend of the moment, in it for the excitement and the “expensive fun”, as she calls it. Given some of the best lines in the picture, Debby is a wisecracking, cynical yet appealing moll. Even the grim Bannion starts to fall for her. When Stone turns on her – in the infamous, still shocking coffeepot scene – the plot turns too, leading to a thrilling, rather surprising ending.

As usual, Grahame shines in her supporting role. So does Marvin. I’m not a huge Glenn Ford fan, but he’s decent in this. My spouse actually found his performance touching at times – despite the fact, so it seemed to me anyway, that Bannion’s the angel of death for just about every woman he comes across in the picture. (I’m still not sure what to make of that.)

All told, The Big Heat is a fun movie to watch, and not just for fans of film-noir.

It’s available for streaming on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, and other services, as well as on DVD from Netflix.

***
The fourth and last Gloria Grahame picture I’d like to suggest to you is called Crossfire, released in 1947. A post war movie about some GIs who get caught up in a murder, it’s another noir-ish whodunit. Unlike the other movies discussed above, Crossfire seems more like a B-picture than a prime-time feature (as do many noir films), but it offers several up and coming male stars of the time: Robert Mitchum, Robert Ryan and Robert Young, all of whom acquit themselves pretty well.

“Hate is like a loaded gun”, proclaimed the movie’s poster, and the not so subtle subtext of the story is the evil of prejudice and, more specifically in this case, anti-semitism. Still, it’s not quite as preachy as Gentleman’s Agreement the Gregory Peck film which came out a few months later. 

Crossfire is not a brilliant film, but Grahame, playing a bargirl who becomes a reluctant alibi witness for one of the soldiers, is just great: cynical, sassy, suspicious of the authorities – really, in her limited role, the highlight of the picture. Here again, she illustrates the adage that there is no such thing as a small part. As I mentioned earlier, this is the film for which she won her first academy award nomination. My advice: check out the first three pictures I’ve reviewed above first. If, like me, you still have the Grahame bug, check out this one next.

Crossfire can be found on Amazon, Vudu, iTunes and other streaming sites and on DVD from Netflix.


No comments:

Post a Comment